Business Incubator Series: Tim Lavengood, Technology Innovation Center – Evanston, Illinois (Part 3)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Praveen Karoshi

Irina: So, is it OK to come to your incubator just with an idea?

Tim: If it’s an idea and a dedication that this is going to be the dedication of a life for a while, then, yes.

As I said, these people are going full time. They have given up their jobs, if they had them, and they are going to give full-time to starting a business. If you are doing that and you have a valid technology, then I can meet with you. I usually meet with companies three to four times, so we spend few hours together before either one of us would make a decision about coming here.

If I think if this is the raw material we can work with, that would be the base to bring them in. I don’t require prior sales. I don’t require that they have their money yet. Again, I think most of them don’t really have the financial wherewithal to establish a sound relationship with an investor or a bank. We would usually have those people before they are ready to do that. When they leave here, they can do all that.

Irina: How many companies have you incubated to date?

Tim: More than 350, since 1986, in 25 years.

Irina: How many companies have been incubated in the past 12 months?

Tim: Probably about 43. Counting the companies that are currently here and those that have come and left in the past 12 months, probably, a little more than that, but 43, conservatively [speaking].

Irina: Is there anything that makes your incubator different from the rest?

Tim: Well, I think, for a technology business, Evanston is probably the best untapped place in the United States. Evanston has everything that Palo Alto, California, or Cambridge, Massachusetts, has. It has a major research university, it is a suburb of the major metropolitan area, it has a fully developed downtown, and it has a quality of life that is very attractive to both the 22-year old technologist and the experienced professional who wants to have good schools for his or her kids. So, I think, in that way, it is a great place for the companies to be.

The other thing, I think, again, we have been able to climb the learning curve of technology entrepreneurship after 25 years of helping 350 clients. As I often say, we are no smarter than anybody else, but if you do something 350 times, you get pretty good at it.

We are almost never asked a question that we haven’t been asked before. We are able to see two to three steps farther down the road than most entrepreneurs simply because we have done this so many times. We have been, in effect, through the first 36 months of building a business for 25 years, and very few organizations have an institutional memory like that.

Irina: How do entrepreneurs usually learn about your incubator?

Tim: Most of our local applicants come from word of mouth because, again, there are a few thousand people in the Chicago area now who have been here. Most people say, I was talking about it, or I met somebody at an event and they suggested that I contact you. Word of mouth is the main way for local people.

For people from outside of town, as I said, it is the Internet, because of the URL that we have. If you are looking for an incubator, where to start a company you will find us even if you are Nigeria [because our URL is theincubator.com].

We do other things: we do brochures, we attend events, we sponsor events, we sponsor some business plan competitions, and we do a lot of work with the local universities, but those are still the two main attractions.

Irina: Do you do any marketing on the Internet?

Tim: As a matter of fact, we are in the process of figuring that out right now. I have set aside some money to develop and implement a strategy for that. We have a website called www.technologyinnovationcenter.org. It is an open forum for technology entrepreneurs.

We now have a little more than 300 members, but we have put very few resources into it, and very few resources, so far, into Facebook or LinkedIn, and we are trying to really pull all those pieces together, associate that with a variety of administrative tools from the cloud for running an entrepreneurial business. We are really going to try in the coming year to build a much stronger community online.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Business Incubator Series: Tim Lavengood, Technology Innovation Center - Evanston, Illinois
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